On the verge of transformative engagement models – Reuters Pharma 2024

The Reuters Pharma 2024 conference is focused on commercial, marketing, medical, access, and patient engagement functions but has converged into a very digitally oriented event. As such, 163 out of 217 talks featured words like ‘digital,’ ‘AI,’ and ‘data’ in their titles. We think this is really exciting, as the industry is truly on the verge of transforming engagement models. We have gathered the three main takeaways we took home from this year’s conference.

1. Technology has gone from being a business enabler to a business driver

It is evident that pharma companies are not looking at technology as enabling the core business but instead looking at it as core business. As such, critical innovations are being made within digital health, pharma digital acquisitions and innovation are heavily prioritized from top pharma[1], and patient engagements are being heavily digitized – with compliant and quality patient data still being a critical and challenging cornerstone to establish. 

We heard exciting perspectives on using digital to improve patient treatment outcomes through digital health solutions and partnerships. With technological advancements, the digital patient experience is catching up with other industries, where it has been the norm for years.

Also, these engagement models must be tailored to a new reality within treatments. For instance, Stefan Oelrich of Bayer talked about how we can now start to fully recreate the human body using stem cells. Such advancements have surely made companies reconsider how therapies are marketed towards HCPs and represent shifts in patient outcomes from treatment to cures. This affects commercial models, and the industry needs to adapt.

 [1] McKinsey, 2023, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/rewired-pharma-companies-will-win-in-the-digital-age

2. Omnichannel is so last year

It literally is last year. Because last year everyone at the conference talked about omnichannel engagements being the holy grail of customer engaging functions. This year at Reuters Pharma 2024, the word ‘omnichannel’ was almost banned. Today, the holy grail is personalization and hyper-personalization. We’ll buy it. The main point is that you want to deliver as relevant content as possible in the best possible channel at the best possible time. And, of course, you should have a consistent message.

A key focus area is content personalization. Of course, personalizing content for each individual HCP on a global scale is a utopia. Therefore, pharma companies are working on global to local models with modular content that is building on top of effective segmentation. Key enablers in this quest are data management (“tagging”), efficient global to local processes, and (spoiler) Gen AI to make sure that MLR reviews are passed efficiently.

In this, measuring the ROI of the holy hyper-personalized engagements can be difficult. We see an apparent convergence in the industry that fully digital (for some HCPs) or partly digital engagements (for the rest) are resulting in the highest ROI. The trend is to correlate in-market sales with brick-level engagements and use A / B testing to falsify whether uplifts are abnormal. This is a common machine learning use case that we’re also working with.

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3. Gen AI is here, there and… Nowhere?

Last year, the ‘Open AI moment’ had almost just happened. So you saw freshly printed posters from all the vendors stating that their tools support ‘GPT’ or the like. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to push a new release to your software when the code is open source…

This year, we expected a multitude of use cases at all the talks. We have to admit that there weren’t too many concrete examples. Almost everyone has their own GPT engine, which they’re proud to chat with. However, there were not too many actual examples of Gen AI applied to concrete use cases.

From talking to industry players, it’s clear that there are many hypotheses around exciting use cases. However, it seems the investment willingness or execution power is not entirely up to speed. We expect to see much more in this area within the next few years as there are substantial value gains to be made. At Intellishore, we’ve identified 14 high-value, low-effort use cases just within commercial. At the conference, they were largely verified but not validated from actual cases in the market.